As we conclude the business architectural perspective topic let us look at how this perspective is related to the business analysis knowledge areas.
1 Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: the business analyst needs to understand the organization’s strategy, operational model, business capabilities, stakeholder, processes, culture and capacity for change.
Once these components are understood, the business analyst can understand which architectural viewpoints are important to the analysis.
The planning and monitoring activities are focused on the following points:
- Choosing which or initiatives will provide the most benefit in achieving the business strategies and outcomes.
- Deciding which of the existing architectural models are being used in the organization.
2 Elicitation and Collaboration: Business analysts working in the discipline of business architecture usually have to deal with a lot of vagueness and uncertainty.
Ensuring that the stakeholders understand and support the organization’s strategy is vital to the business architectural success.
The business architect acts as a liaison between the needs and desires of individual stakeholders, and the organizational goals and strategy.
3 Requirements Life Cycle Management: Business analysts working in the discipline of business architecture need to understand how the initiative affects the business architecture and find ways to improve the business architecture.
They should also find potential changes in both internal and external situations , and decide on how to include these changes into the business architecture of the organization.
4 Strategy Analysis : Business architecture plays an important role in strategy analysis. It provides architectural views into the current state of the organization and helps to describe both the future and the transition states needed to attain the future state.
To remain competitive, the business must analyze the following factors:
- Market conditions.
- Which markets to enter.
- How the organization will compete in the transition state.
- How position the organization’s brand.
5 Requirements Analysis and Design Definition : Business architecture provides individual architectural views into the organization via a range of models.
These models include capability and value maps, organizational maps, and information and business process models.
Models are intended to provide information that result in finer requirements analysis and design.
This information would help reduce the risk of duplication of efforts in creating capabilities, systems, or information that already exist somewhere else in the enterprise.
6 Solution Evaluation: Business architecture asks basic questions about the business, and how well it is performing.
To answer this question, several other questions must be answered, which include the following:
- What is initiative expecting to achieve?
- How is the initiative measured in terms of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bounded) objectives?
- What is needed to measure those objectives?
- How does the business collect that information?
- How is the performance information to be presented i.e is it reports, ad hoc queries, dashboards, etc.?
- How would this information be used in the future?
For example, at a more detailed level, an important part of capability definition and process architecture is to find the specific performance characteristics and results that those capabilities or processes are expected to achieve.